Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Social Software Development: Insights And Solutions, Abhishek Sharma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Over last few decades, the way software is developed has changed drastically. From being an activity performed by developers working individually to develop standalone programs, it has transformed into a highly collaborative and cooperative activity. Software development today can be considered as a participatory culture, where developers coordinate and engage together to develop software while continuously learning from one another and creating knowledge.

In order to support their communication and collaboration needs, software developers often use a variety of social media channels. These channels help software developers to connect with like-minded developers and explore collaborations on software projects of interest. …

Comparison Mining From Text, Maksim Tkachenko

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online product reviews are important factors of consumers' purchase decisions. They invade more and more spheres of our life, we have reviews on books, electronics, groceries, entertainments, restaurants, travel experiences, etc. More than 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before they purchase products as reported by various consumers surveys. This observation suggests that product review information enhances consumer experience and helps them to make better-informed purchase decisions. There is an enormous amount of online reviews posted on e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Apple, Yelp, TripAdvisor. They vary in information and may be written with different experiences and preferences.

If …

Feature-Based Transfer Learning In Natural Language Processing, Jianfei Yu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In the past few decades, supervised machine learning approach is one of the most important methodologies in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. Although various kinds of supervised learning methods have been proposed to obtain the state-of-the-art performance across most NLP tasks, the bottleneck of them lies in the heavy reliance on the large amount of manually annotated data, which is not always available in our desired target domain/task. To alleviate the data sparsity issue in the target domain/task, an attractive solution is to find sufficient labeled data from a related source domain/task. However, for most NLP applications, due to …

Reinforcement Learning For Collective Multi-Agent Decision Making, Duc Thien Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this thesis, we study reinforcement learning algorithms to collectively optimize decentralized policy in a large population of autonomous agents. We notice one of the main bottlenecks in large multi-agent system is the size of the joint trajectory of agents which quickly increases with the number of participating agents. Furthermore, the noiseof actions concurrently executed by different agents in a large system makes it difficult for each agent to estimate the value of its own actions, which is well-known as the multi-agent credit assignment problem. We propose a compact representation for multi-agent systems using the aggregate counts to address …

Modeling Movement Decisions In Networks: A Discrete Choice Model Approach, Larry Lin Junjie

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this dissertation, we address the subject of modeling and simulation of agents and their movement decision in a network environment. We emphasize the development of high quality agent-based simulation models as a prerequisite before utilization of the model as an evaluation tool for various recommender systems and policies. To achieve this, we propose a methodological framework for development of agent-based models, combining approaches such as discrete choice models and data-driven modeling.

The discrete choice model is widely used in the field of transportation, with a distinct utility function (e.g., demand or revenue-driven). Through discrete choice models, the movement decision …

Empathetic Computing For Inclusive Application Design, Kenny Choo Tsu Wei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The explosive growth of the ecosystem of personal and ambient computing de- vices coupled with the proliferation of high-speed connectivity has enabled ex- tremely powerful and varied mobile computing applications that are used every- where. While such applications have tremendous potential to improve the lives of impaired users, most mobile applications have impoverished designs to be inclusive– lacking support for users with specific disabilities. Mobile app designers today haveinadequate support to design existing classes of apps to support users with specific disabilities, and more so, lack the support to design apps that specifically target these users. One way to resolve …

Analyzing And Modeling Users In Multiple Online Social Platforms, Roy Lee Ka Wei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the empirical analysis on user-generated data from multiple online social platforms (OSPs) and modeling of latent user factors in multiple OSPs setting.

In the first part of this dissertation, we conducted cross-platform empirical studies to better understand user's social and work activities in multiple OSPs. In particular, we proposed new methodologies to analyze users' friendship maintenance and collaborative activities in multiple OSPs. We also apply the proposed methodologies on real-world OSP datasets, and the findings from our empirical studies have provided us with a better understanding on users' social and work activities which are previously not uncovered …

Proactive And Reactive Resource/Task Allocation For Agent Teams In Uncertain Environments, Pritee Agrawal

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Synergistic interactions between task/resource allocation and multi-agent coordinated planning/assignment exist in many problem domains such as trans- portation and logistics, disaster rescue, security patrolling, sensor networks, power distribution networks, etc. These domains often feature dynamic environments where allocations of tasks/resources may have complex dependencies and agents may leave the team due to unforeseen conditions (e.g., emergency, accident or violation, damage to agent, reconfiguration of environment).

Secure Enforcement Of Isolation Policy On Multicore Platforms With Virtualization Techniques, Siqi Zhao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

A number of virtualization based systems have been proposed in the literature as an effective measure against the adversaries with the kernel privilege. However, under a systematic analysis, such systems exhibit vulnerabilities that can still be exploited by such an attacker with the kernel privilege. The fundamental reason is that there is an inherent incompatibility between the tamper-proof requirement and the complete mediation requirement of the reference monitor model. The incompatibility manifests in the virtualization based systems in the form of a discrepancy between the enforcement capability demanded by the high-level policy and the one achievable through the system design …

Context Recovery In Location-Based Social Networks, Wen Haw Chong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses context recovery in Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), which are platforms where users post content from various locations. With this general LBSN definition, many existing social media platforms that support user-generated location relevant content using mobile devices could also qualify as LBSNs. Context recovery for such user posts refers to recovering the venue and the semantic contexts of these user posts. Such information is useful for user profiling and to support various applications such as venue recommendation and location- based advertising.

Overfitting In Automated Program Repair: Challenges And Solutions, Dinh Xuan Bach Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This chapter discusses the main problem and motivation of this dissertation. It also discusses a quantification of various research issues directly related to the dissertation. A summary of works done will also be presented along with the structure of the dissertation.

Music Popularity, Diffusion And Recommendation In Social Networks: A Fusion Analytics Approach, Jing Ren

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Streaming music and social networks offer an easy way for people to gain access to a massive amount of music, but there are also challenges for the music industry to design for promotion strategies via the new channels. My dissertation employs a fusion of machine-based methods and explanatory empiricism to explore music popularity, diffusion, and promotion in the social network context.

Advanced Malware Detection For Android Platform, Ke Xu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In the first quarter of 2018, 75.66% of smartphones sales were devices running An- droid. Due to its popularity, cyber-criminals have increasingly targeted this ecosys- tem. Malware running on Android severely violates end users security and privacy, allowing many attacks such as defeating two factor authentication of mobile bank- ing applications, capturing real-time voice calls and leaking sensitive information. In this dissertation, I describe the pieces of work that I have done to effectively de- tect malware on Android platform, i.e., ICC-based malware detection system (IC- CDetector), multi-layer malware detection system (DeepRefiner), and self-evolving and scalable malware detection system (DroidEvolver) …

Entity Summarization Of Reviews And Micro-Reviews, Thanh Son Nguyen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Along with the regular review content, there is a new type of user-generated content arising from the prevalence of mobile devices and social media, that is micro-review. Micro-reviews are bite-size reviews (usually under 200 char- acters), commonly posted on social media or check-in services, using a mobile device. They capture the immediate reaction of users, and they are rich in information, concise, and to the point. Both reviews and micro-reviews are useful for users to get to know the entity of interest, thus facilitating users in making their decision of purchasing or dining. However, the abundant number of both reviews …

Automatic Vulnerability Detection And Repair, Siqi Ma

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Vulnerability becomes a major threat to the security of many systems, including computer systems (e.g., Windows and Linux) and mobile systems (e.g., Android and iOS). Attackers can steal private information and perform harmful actions by exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities often remain undetected for a long time as they may not affect the typical functionalities of systems. Thus, it is important to detect and repair a vulnerability in time. However, it is often difficult for a developer to detect and repair a vulnerability correctly and timely if he/she is not a security expert. Fortunately, automatic repair approaches significantly assist developers to …

Learning Latent Characteristics Of Locations Using Location-Based Social Networking Data, Thanh Nam Doan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation addresses the modeling of latent characteristics of locations to describe the mobility of users of location-based social networking platforms. With many users signing up location-based social networking platforms to share their daily activities, these platforms become a gold mine for researchers to study human visitation behavior and location characteristics. Modeling such visitation behavior and location characteristics can benefit many use- ful applications such as urban planning and location-aware recommender sys- tems. In this dissertation, we focus on modeling two latent characteristics of locations, namely area attraction and neighborhood competition effects using location-based social network data. Our literature survey …

Recommending Apis For Software Evolution, Ferdian Thung

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Softwares are constantly evolving. This evolution has been made easier through the use of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). By leveraging APIs, developers reuse previously implemented functionalities and concentrate on writing new codes. These APIs may originate from either third parties or internally from other compo- nents of the software that are currently developed. In the first case, developers need to know how to find and use third party APIs. In the second case, developers need to be aware of internal APIs in their own software. In either case, there is often too much information to digest. For instance, finding the …